Von Kassel had been all for taking their plan to Heydrich, in the first place. Heydrich would know precisely when to approach the Führer, and how to do it without the risk of a costly rebuff. They had all agreed to this: the logic of it was undeniable. But now Maihof was alone, cut off from the support of his colleagues and with some rival faction hounding him to the grave. Every reason, then, for going to Heydrich, and sooner than ever. But he didn’t trust the man. He was a fox: Reinhard the Fox, as everyone called him (out of his hearing, if they valued their life). It could even be Heydrich who was the eminence grise behind these ghastly assassinations, making a bid to seize the kudos for himself when Hitler bestrode the world like a Colossus. To go to Heydrich might be to go to his executioner. Go, then, to Himmler. He outranked the Fox, and had no ambitions. He was a civil servant, plodding, loyal, predictable. He would lead his legions of secret policemen over the brink of'a cliff at a moment’s notice, if his beloved Führer told him it was for the good of Germany. He was a robot, and as such could be trusted not to get any ideas—such as taking over the atomic feasibility study from General Maihof.

  “Report to my office at General Headquarters,” the Reichsführer-SS had told him amiably as they were leaving the herb garden. “I shall be interested to hear your plans for a New German World.”

  So the decision was made. It wasn’t to get out of

  Germany by the skin of his teeth, and it wasn’t to beard the lion in the Chancellory. Himmler was a man he could work with, and also die man to give him a dozen devoted bodyguards if he asked for them. Which he would. As the big open Mercedes purred through the hills of Sachsen-Anhalt he began feeling better, and took deep breaths of the evening air, like a man reprieved.

  “Magnificent countryside,” he told the aide on his left.

  SS-Captain Howitz looked across the monotonous hills half lost in the lowering light. “Magnificent, Herr Obergruppenführer,” he answered in slight surprise.

  Behind them, the other staff car had now closed the distance to fifty yards, having overtaken an armored reconnaissance vehicle a few minutes ago, so that there was now nothing between the two open Mercedes. General Maihof’s driver, SS-Sergeant Bockman, was keeping an eye on the mirror, as he always did, and noticed that the staff car following them was still gaining ground and might wish to overtake. He was mildly surprised to see that it was being driven by an SS officer whose rank he couldn’t discern. A Mercedes 500 was normally the transport of a staff colonel or upward, and he would normally have his personal driver. An officer below that rank didn’t rate a driver, and would be at the wheel alone, or with passengers; but he didn’t rate a Mercedes 500 either. But then, a colonel or upward could break quite a few of the rules, and this chap might have put his driver down at a railway station and gone off to meet a girl; strictly forbidden, of course, but a lot would depend on how many oak-leaves he had on his tunic, and how many crossed swords. There were some wild ones in the SS, no doubt about it. It wasn’t the Army.

  Sergeant Bockman maintained his speed at S5 kph and kept circumspectly to the right side of the road. If the car behind him wanted to overtake it could do so; there was only light traffic coming the other way from the north. He drove instinctively, with the precision of long habit, and part of his mind was occupied with the problem that had come into his life, hitting him right between the eyes only a week ago. He still couldn’t believe it.

  He’d been wiping the rainspots off the Mercedes at the Transport Pool garage when a clerk from the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt office had come to find him. “Before you were married, did you submit the required Ahnenpapiere certificates?”

  “Of course.” The clerk hadn’t addressed him by his title, and he didn’t like that. He was proud of it. When you were an SS-Unterscharführer, you were on your way up.

  “You believed your prospective wife was a pure Aryan?”

  “Certainly. And she still is,” he said sharply.

  The clerk shook his head slowly, looking down at the papers he’d brought with him. “We’ve been checking. It looks as if she was lying. She’s a Mischling, second degree. There’s Jewish blood. Look.” He thrust the papers at Sergeant Bockman. “A Jewish grandmother. Didn’t she ever tell you?”

  After a long time Bockman said, “No.” He turned away from the papers. “Are you sure of your facts?” “Certainly.” His glance of surprise was downright insolent. “You’d better present yourself at our office, Unterscharführer Bockman, at the earliest opportunity.” And that was that. Right between the eyes.

  He’d said nothing to Rita, when he got home off duty. He’d wanted to think about it. After all, she was a good wife, a good little woman, kept the place shining, always made sure there was a hot meal for him at any time of the day or night—in this job you worked odd hours. And she was pretty. Well, attractive, say. But he couldn’t keep his mind off it, her being partly a Jewess. All they’d told him at the Race and Resettlement office was that he’d have to make up his mind about what he’d do. That was all they’d said. He supposed they meant he’d have to divorce her, if he didn’t want to be thrown out of the SS. And him a full sergeant! But he knew how strict they were. Even an officer had to get his fiancée’s family background checked over before he could marry. Any sign of Jewish blood, and out. She could be a cripple, a foreigner, anything you like. But not Jew, or even part Jew, even a tenth. This was the SS, an elite organization and the Führer’s greatest pride. You could see their point of view.

  For a whole week now, he’d turned over and gone to sleep the minute he put out the bedroom light. Couldn’t fancy her, somehow. She’d always been very good, Rita, let him do anything he felt like, anytime, never complained. She’d always been able to stir him up whenever she wanted, just by the way she undressed for bed, a bit more slowly than usual, standing nearer the light. But not now. It was disgusting to think about. Jewish blood. She didn’t know what was happening, of course. “Don’t you love me anymore?” she’d been asking for days now. Putting on different lipsticks, doing her hair twice a day, getting out her black underwear. Pathetic, really. A Jewess.

  So there it was. He’d have to choose between the SS and Rita. And tomorrow, when he was off duty for the weekend, he’d get it over with. Tell her straight. She’d been a good wife to him, but if she and her family thought they could bring dirty blood into the SS, they’d have to think again.

  The staff car behind him was going to overtake now. He kept well in and maintained a steady speed, hearing the rush of its engine merging with his own.

  No, it had been a shock all right. But there was this about it: there was no question of what he must do. He wasn’t, as you might say, on the horns of a dilemma. A Mischling. Even the very word felt dirty in his mouth.

  No wonder she was always talking about money, telling him how she wanted to help him save the good money he earned, save for a baby, save for their first little house where they could be on their own, save for this, save for that, never buying a new dress, always making them herself—money, money, money, it was all she could think about. By God, you could always tell a Jew, if you listened long enough!

  He’d tell her tomorrow. Mince no words. She’d got to go.

  The revolver bullet entered his brain on the left side and its force pitched him against the Lieutenant sitting in the passenger’s seat as the blood-burst spattered against the windscreen, the slipstream whipping some of it back to leave crimson flecks on the faces and uniform of General Maihof and his aide. Sergeant Bockman’s death had been instantaneous and without warning, so that his gloved hands had simply dropped away from the steering wheel as his torso had rocked from the hips in the direction of the bullet’s travel. The bullet itself, fired at very close range, passed through the skull on both sides and smashed the nose of the Lieutenant as Sergeant Bockman’s body lurched against him. The car kept to its course for a few seconds, the road being straight and smooth at this point, but it was now accelerating, since the dead driver’s boot had been thrust against the throttle pedal as the weight of his body slumped downward, its muscles inert.

  In the rear seat, General Maihof was unable to make out exactly what was happening. At the sound of the shot—very loud at such short range—his fear of assassination, recently lulled by his decision to see Himmler and seek his protection, had returned in an instant and with overwhelming force, to the point where he half believed the shot had gone into his own body and produced some kind of paralysis, so that he could feel nothing. But Captain Howitz, sitting beside him, kept his head in the first few seconds, and saw that the open staff car that had been overtaking them was now dropping quickly behind again as the driver applied the brakes. The Captain wasn’t quite sure what had happened. He’d seen the driver of the other car—an SS-Colonel, by his insignia—aim his revolver straight at Sergeant Bockman and fire. And Bockman was now lying against the aide in front, with blood flying all over the place. But the scene was so appalling, so terrifying, that the mind of Captain Howitz was trying to rationalize the whole incident as a hallucination. But this degree of shock lasted only for a few seconds, and he was now perfectly conscious of what was happening.

  The car was veering slowly across to the wrong side of the road, and coming from the opposite direction was some kind of fuel tanker, with its powerful horns blaring and its headlights flashing in warning. Captain Howitz stared for another half second, then his mind went blank again as he realized there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that he could do.

  The driver of the fuel tanker attempted at the last instant to swerve away from the oncoming Mercedes into the ditch at the roadside, where the first of the wildflowers were coming into bloom, orange and yellow and amethyst. But his attempt was too late, and the two vehicles met head-on at a combined speed of approximately 155 kph. The immense weight of the tanker was hardly checked at all as the much lighter vehicle impacted against it; but its degree of deceleration, however slight, was enough to bring the 15,000 liters of high-octane aviation fuel surging against the baffles. The baffles held, because the tanker was full, but the heavy steel lugs holding the tank to the chassis broke away, and a split appeared in the forward end as the tank shifted under the momentum and smashed through the driver’s cab.

  SS-General Walther Maihof, his face and tunic spattered with the blood of Sergeant Bockman, was hurled against the front of the tanker at approximately 100 kilometers per hour—the speed at which the Mercedes had been traveling after the dead Sergeant’s boot had been thrust against the accelerator pedal. His uniform, in the instant before his body struck the tanker’s radiator, was suddenly darkened by the spray of aviation fuel that was escaping from the split in the tank itself. In the climactic impact of metal against metal, more than one spark was produced.

  It was reported later that the light of the ensuing conflagration was seen against the low clouds from the streets of Luckenwalde, seventy-five kilometers away.

  25

  BERLIN, 21 MARCH 1940

  Dr. Joseph Lenneberg took his slide rule and checked the figures on the graph, noting the results and entering them with the comparative study of Lise Meitner’s work on the initial phase of the reaction, involving bombardment of the uranium nucleus with slow-speed neutrons. The two studies were in perfect agreement. He had already told them that, General Heidel and the others. What did they want him to do? Disagree with people like Meitner and Otto Hahn?

  No. They wanted to be sure.

  It wasn’t cold in here anymore. He had pressed the electric bell and one of the guards had come. He had said he was cold, and they had turned on the radiators, and now he was warm again. It was unbelievable. He wanted to laugh. In Sachsenhausen he had been cold, but there was no electric bell to press, nor any radiators. He had nearly died of pneumonia, there. All winter, people had been dying of the cold. Max, Amos, Lajos the Hungarian and all the others, so many others, while the snow had come whistling and whirling through the barbed wire, driven by the wind and heaped against the huts along the east side of the camp.

  Shoveling parties! Double up, there! Shoveling parties!

  It was the only time they had been warm, when they had been shoveling the snow, their thin cotton shirts soaked with sweat until the wind froze it into ice, despite its salt content. Many of them had been warm when they had died, swinging their shovel for the last time before their hearts gave out and they dropped into the snow. They had died so fast, and the snow had drifted so fast, that they were buried within a few minutes, only to be dug up again by the men moving behind them.

  Shoveling parties!

  When his friends heard he was on the list for extermination they had pushed him under the end hut, near the garbage dump, coming to feed him every day and to bring rags, old newspapers, anything they could find that would help to keep him warm, even at the risk of their own lives, because to pick up a rag was stealing, and the penalty for stealing was death. There had been only three inches of space between his chest and the planks at the bottom of the hut, so that he couldn’t turn over, or turn on his side; he had lain flat on his back for six days, letting the drips of melting ice trickle into his mouth, moving his hand from the place where they left the food for him to his mouth, as a crab did with its pincers, fouling himself where he lay, and sometimes sleeping, though never knowing the time, because the winter day was so dark and he could see nothing but the planks only a few inches in front of his eyes; only when the searchlights swept the main compound did he know it was night.

  Now he pressed the electric bell, and said he was cold; and they turned the radiators on, to warm him.

  “Work well,” the SS General had told him, “and you’ll live in comfort, and your child will be safe.”

  Hildi safe.

  That was all that meant anything to him now. And of course they knew that. So he worked well, and lived comfortably, and listened to Hildi’s voice over the telephone every day, as they’d arranged for him to do.

  “When are you coming home, Daddy?”

  “Soon. Soon now, my darling.”

  Hildi safe.

  He had gone through all that business with his conscience, of course. Days ago. Nights ago, more accurately, when there was time to think. He knew what they were asking him to do. Help them make an atomic weapon, so that they could conquer the world with it. Thousands would die. Perhaps millions. The fallout of partially decayed radioactive products would be lethal. It would rise high into the atmosphere and then drift on the winds, covering vast areas of land and spreading death. Lise had warned people of this; so had Fritz Strassman. And the Germans were asking him to help them create this kind of world, the end of the world, or certainly of civilization, so that they could rake among the ashes for the survivors, and make them slaves, and commit them to the camps, to the crematoria, where they would become ashes themselves, joining the ashes that were spreading across the surface of the earth. The Ice Age, now the Ash Age. It had driven him half out of his mind, trying to encompass the enormity of what they were going to do. With his help.

  Then he had at last decided to admit the obvious: that the Germans had gone mad, that the world would soon be mad, if they were in command of it, and that a man, any man, must think of himself and whatever he valued, or cherished; himself first, and the things dear to him, and the madness afterward.

  Hildi safe. It would be his watchword.

  He peeled the graph from the block and began on the next, following Otto Hahn’s equations this time and preparing the figures for comparison. He knew perfectly well what the result would be. Hahn and Strassman had made the discovery; Meitner and Frisch had elaborated on it and explained it in their papers. Was he expected to discover something new, or find mistakes? No. He was expected to reassure these power-mad fanatics that the figures were correct, that this doomsday weapon could be made, and that Adolf Hitler could possess it.

  So, Joseph Lenneberg, you have decided to risk the safety of the entire civilized world, for the safety of your child.

  Yes.

  Then you must be mad too.

  If you care to think so, yes. I am mad too. Lying under the hut with my eyes against the darkness for all those hours, all those days, I went mad. So be it. But I will tell you this. I have worked out a few equations of my own, a few graphs; and the results are these, my friend: a man must think first of himself, in these mad times, and of the things he values. That is my watchword now.

  Hildi safe.

  He peeled the sheet off the block and began on the next graph, and was still working on it when the night guard opened the door and came in. Joseph went on with his work, his thin blue-veined hands moving under the angled reading lamp. “What do you want?” he asked in a moment, without looking up.

  “Dr. Joseph Lenneberg?”

  It wasn’t the guard’s voice.

  He looked up in surprise. His eyes had been concentrating on his work in the glare of the lamp for hours on end, and all he could see was a tall figure in uniform looking down at him.

  “Yes?”

  “Come with me.”

  Joseph got up from the stool, his thin body cramped and aching. He could see the man better now, and was uneasy about him. He was an SS Colonel, which was nothing remarkable in this place; the laboratory had been taken over by these people. But his face was deathly pale, and his eyes looked haunted, set deeply in their sockets and ringed with fatigue. Even the shaded light seemed to worry him, as if he had not slept for a long time. Joseph had seen faces like this in the camps but not under a cap with the Death’s Head insignia.